Testimony

by Robbie Robertson

  Back at Le Coq d’Or down on Yonge Street, things were rocky too. One night Ronnie told Rick he was banning Rick’s girlfriend from our shows at the club. He said that if Rick only sat with his girlfriend between sets, he wasn’t doing part of his job, which was to mingle with the crowd. Rick objected to being told whether he could see his girl at the club or not. Levon didn’t like it either and asked Ron what he would actually do if Rick’s girlfriend came to the club.

  “Well, I guess I’ll have just to fire his ass,” the Hawk shot back.

  Levon frowned and half laughed. “Ah, man, you can’t do that. Hell, you can’t tell someone who they can have come to the club and who they can’t. That ain’t right.”

  “Just watch me,” Ron answered sharply. “I’ll do whatever the hell I want as long as I’m paying the wages.” You could feel a chill in the air.

  I was twenty and my life felt in turmoil. What was right, what was wrong, who was my family, who my friends? Tension and distance were growing between Levon and Ronnie too. The battle over Rick’s girlfriend had stuck in Levon’s craw, and the bigger issues that had been dividing us, in terms of both Ronnie’s absences and our diverging musical directions, were starting to boil over. One of the main sticking points was that Levon felt we should be paid more if Ron wasn’t going to show up to perform. A reasonable point, but Levon took it to a place of deep and growing anger. He kept preaching to the guys that Ronnie was cheating us and treating us like shit.

  I saw a side of Levon I’d never seen before. He stewed with bitterness toward his old friend and mentor. He showed a profound paranoia about being treated like a country fool. The rest of us felt that Levon was the senior and original member of the Hawks, so we supported him, but I felt sorry to see two friends who had been so tight turning to such hostility.

  Ron took a hard line: he was the boss and that was that. Finally, one night things came to a head: Rick’s girlfriend had been making sure she stayed away from the club on nights when Ron showed up, but one time she came with a couple of friends just before the Hawk arrived. Ron spied her in the middle of a song and his face turned dark red. He nodded harshly at Rick. Levon shook his head at me as if in warning: Okay, boys, here we go. I knew it was about to get bad and ripped off a raging guitar solo, trying to let off some steam.

  When we wrapped for the night, Ronnie announced in a kindly but stern voice, “Well, it looks like I’m going to have to replace young Ricky here. We had a deal, and he broke it, so I’m gonna keep my side of the deal.” And with that, he turned and walked out of the club.

  The Hawk didn’t show up the next couple of nights. We held down the fort at the club, contemplating our next move. We were all of the same mind—that he was being a complete jerk in threatening to fire Rick. Levon said he was going to call Ron and demand more money for the nights he didn’t show up, and not just going forward but also retroactively. I knew Ron would never agree to these conditions and thought we should put our demands in a more clear-cut framework: we wanted a significant raise, or we were going to leave; we also wanted a bonus when we played without him; and if he fired Rick, he’d have to fire us all.

  “But the son of a bitch is fucking us,” Levon yelled. “And I want to rub it in his face.”

  “He’s not screwing us, he’s just offering us a deal we don’t accept,” I said. “And we’re making changes. That’s it. No animosity, no revenge, just plain business. Let’s not get caught up in personal crap.”

  The others agreed. They didn’t hate Ron; they just wanted to be treated fairly. But when Levon called Ron, he had venom in his voice.

  It was by now sadly obvious how this would turn out. I had already started imagining the musical challenges that lay ahead. We had to find our individual sound and identity, and head in a more ambitious creative direction.

  As expected, Levon fired up, Ron fired back, and the Hawks left Ronnie Hawkins. I knew it was time to go, but I couldn’t help but recognize that Ronnie had discovered me at the ripe old age of fifteen and hired me at sixteen. Ronnie could be rough, but he had never personally treated me badly, even if I didn’t agree with all of his decisions.

  It was tough, it was rough, but how you gonna stop this train?

  Our first order of business was to see if Colonel Kudlets was willing to book us on our own. As it turned out, Ronnie had just notified the Colonel that he wouldn’t be using him as a booking agent in the future—which left an empty slot on his roster for us. Now we had to start thinking about getting our own record deal. We expanded our repertoire until it slowly represented solely our taste and not the best of Rompin’ Ronnie.

  The Colonel told us he could book us for six weeks of shows in Quebec and Ontario—the first way up north in Timmins, Ontario, not far from what’s called the “tree line,” where it gets so cold that even trees can’t grow. Levon sold the ’63 Caddy and leased two navy blue Monarch station wagons for the five of us and Business Bill Avis, who stayed on as our road manager. Our haul was expanding: not only did we have guitars, amps, and drums, but we carried Garth’s big Lowrey organ and Leslie speaker, which he’d gotten soon after he joined the Hawks. The weight of all the gear and trailers beat the hell out of those Monarchs. They reminded me of a couple packhorses from a western movie; we could have called them Poor Ole Blue and his brother Whiplash.

  We rolled through Timmins, Sudbury, Rouyn-Noranda, Montreal, and as far as Quebec City. The venues we played boasted a very different clientele than we were used to. Some were in blue-collar mining towns or lumberjack areas full of true roughnecks, hardworking people who drank just as hard. When a fight broke out in the bars, beer bottles being smashed and used as weapons was par for the course. Guys hit one another with chairs, sometimes tables. We soon developed one simple rule: if a fight breaks out, keep playing; don’t stop the music no matter what happens. If we were between songs, we’d kick right into the next one. Maybe a slower tempo might help ease the tension. Richard singing “Stormy Monday” was always a good choice, as it was rhythmically difficult to brawl to.

  After that trial by fire, the Colonel had us booked back in Toronto at Le Coq d’Or for the first time without Ronnie. Our set list of songs and our whole stage presentation were shaping up, and our confidence grew a little bit each night. Levon and I started imagining that all of our hard work and “dues paying” was coming to fruition.

  One night between sets Levon and I slipped down the street to a new Jack Fisher–owned club called the Friar’s Tavern. The famous Cannonball Adderley Sextet was playing and we couldn’t wait to check it out. Cannonball and his brother Nat were on horns, and they had a new guy on tenor sax and flute. We watched the new guy in awe—he was one of the coolest-looking cats you’d ever seen, tall with longish hair, in a tailored suit, tinted French wire-rim glasses, and a goatee. Cannonball stepped to the mic and said, “We’d like to feature a new member of our group, Mr. Charles Lloyd.”

  Mr. Lloyd not only looked sharp—he was a great musician. I immediately loved his sound, his phrasing: southern, modern, fresh. We rushed back the next night and he played even better. After that set I spoke to him and told him I was in a band playing up the street. He replied that he was from Memphis and had played with B. B. King and some R&B bands. I mentioned that a friend had some hash and we were gonna have a smoke, if he wanted to join. “Of course,” he said. Later he confessed that playing with Cannonball was a temporary thing—he was interested in starting his own band in the near future. I was surprised to hear it since I thought the band looked so solid onstage. But I could tell he was seriously on his own wavelength.

  The next booking the Colonel had for us was a full left turn into the Twilight Zone. The dance craze called the Twist had become hugely popular, and we were on our way to the very center of its existence: the Peppermint Lounge on 45th Street in New York City. Before we left Toronto, Levon and I told Garth, Rick, and Richard that we weren’t going to be able to afford to keep Jerry “Ish Kabibble” Penfound in the group. We
all really liked Jerry, but we were barely making ends meet. It was heartbreaking to see him go. As we headed for New York City, chasing a record deal, I looked back at the skyline of Toronto with a blue feeling at leaving behind my uncle Natie and Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins.

  On this trip to New York I felt a stronger connection to the big city, which seemed more familiar and less cold. People in Canada and in the South were known for their friendliness and hospitality, but a first impression of New York City was that someone would just as soon walk on you as look at you. And the more time I spent here, the more I dug that in-your-face attitude.

  The Peppermint Lounge was an auspicious New York debut for Levon and the Hawks, but we soon found that the club owners only wanted us to play like the kings of the Twist, Joey Dee and the Starliters and Chubby Checker. We needed the gig, so we agreed, though this wasn’t our thing at all and we soon fell back on playing our kind of music. People danced to it the best they could, but night by night you could feel the tension growing with the management. The last straw came when our friend John Hammond showed up and sat in with us. We played Billy Boy Arnold’s “I Wish You Would” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful,” which were both shuffles you could dance to—but they weren’t Twists. One of the owners flipped out and pulled Levon aside. “What is this shit you’re playing?”

  “We’re playing good music, sir. That’s what we do,” Levon answered.

  “If you don’t do more Twist music, we’re going to fire you.”

  “I can’t wait to get out of this piss-ass joint,” Levon fumed.

  Before heading back to Canada, we learned that our number would be shrinking again: Bruce Bruno, who had long pined to get back to his old neighborhood and his girlfriend, BJ, decided to leave the fold and stay in New York. We understood, but I was really going to miss “Stone the Bone.”

  We hadn’t been offered a record deal in New York yet, but now we heard that Duff Roman, a local Toronto DJ, had put together some backing for us to go into the studio and cut some tracks for his label, Roman Records. That was welcome news from a welcome source: many moons ago Duff had put together the Dixie Arena show where my band had opened for Ronnie and the Hawks.

  I always enjoyed getting back in the studio to learn a little more about the recording process. We took a loose approach, deciding to try some different ideas and see what stuck. We dug into the songs we’d rehearsed back at the Concord before we left Ronnie. To warm up we cut a cover of James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please.” And even though I hadn’t had much time to focus on songwriting, I tried to throw some things together for the occasion. We recorded a track I wrote with Garth called “Bacon Fat,” inspired by the wilted salad my mother made for Levon, her other favorite son. With a few minutes left in our session, we laid down “Biscuits and Taters” and then a one-take version of “Robbie’s Blues,” a jam we played at gigs to show off a little. No matter what we cut, it was always good to hear ourselves in playback to understand what sounded good on tape, as opposed to just live in the room.

  As he’d promised, John Hammond asked Levon, Garth, and me to play on his new record when we were next in New York. He said some real good blues musicians were coming in from Chicago to join us: Charlie Musselwhite on harmonica and another guitar player named Mike Bloomfield, along with bassist Jimmy Lewis, who had played with the Drifters and Sam Cooke. In the studio we jumped right in with “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” and John prompted me to wail hard. Mike Bloomfield didn’t yet have as much experience under his belt as I did and decided to play some piano, but he was tremendously obliging and enthusiastic. Musselwhite was a pure pleasure on harp. He knew when to burn and when to cool. Every time we went into the control room to hear a playback, John’s producer from Vanguard Records would make some suggestions and John would get red-faced and disagree. I thought, Maybe this is how it works, the artist and the recording company representative always at odds with one another.

  We recorded a pretty mean version of Otis Rush’s “So Many Roads,” and John later decided to make that the album title too. The recording went by in a flash. I didn’t know if we had done great work, but there was no question we’d had a real good time. Afterward Bloomfield invited Levon and me to come to Chicago sometime, to take in the blues clubs on the South Side. He said he even had a place where we could stay. I left the studio and walked along the New York City streets alone. Funny, I thought, how you can be in such a bustling, crowded major city and still feel isolated at the same time. I strolled through the diamond district on 47th Street, missing my uncle Natie and thinking of all the madness he had put us through. How can he be doing in prison, swallowing all those dreams?

  John Hammond was so appreciative of the work we had done on his record that he surprised us with an ounce of Panama Red, which to us was the marijuana of kings. I opened the bag to have a whiff, and sure enough, it was the real deal: orangey red in color, rare as pink diamonds. It smoked with a utopian flavor.

  We had to decide whether it was okay to bring this very special weed across the border with us. Typically we would never take chances carrying drugs through customs because the Canadian authorities looked at pot through the same lens as heroin or any other hard drugs. But we’d been back and forth many, many times and had never had our clothes searched, so we figured the risks were minimal. Consensus was we couldn’t leave the Panama Red behind.

  I put the bag in the inside pocket of my beige overcoat and threw it in the back of the station wagon with everyone else’s coats. At the border crossing above Buffalo we held our breath as the immigration and customs officers gave us the once-over. They just looked at our papers and waved us on through. We let out yelps of relief as we drove toward Toronto. Bill Avis pulled out some rolling papers from his briefcase, took the bag from my coat, and proceeded to roll a nice fat one in celebration of our smuggling act. The six of us smoked that joint with deep, lingering pleasure.

  Bill had left our other wagon in the parking garage at the Toronto airport, and we needed to stop and pick it up. Levon pulled up next to the other car and we all got out to stretch our legs.

  “I’ll drive the other one,” Rick said, and Levon passed him the keys. As Garth, Richard, and Rick got ready to load into the other vehicle, we heard a shuffling sound. Suddenly, four men appeared from behind cement pillars, moving quickly. One of them pulled Levon out of the car and shouted, “Police!” Then a sedan roared up behind us and screeched to a halt, blocking us in. “Don’t anybody move! RCMP!”

  There were local detectives, airport police, Toronto narcotics squad, and Mounties. All together, seven plainclothes police officers surrounded us. We were so shocked that we were frozen in place. They searched the station wagon we’d left at the airport and came up with a small film canister with some pot in it. Then they searched the car we were driving and found the bag of Panama Red. The undercover Mountie held them both up in front of him as he walked toward us. “This is bad. You’re under arrest.” Then he turned to Garth. “Hello, Garth. I’m sorry to see you involved in this.”

  Garth lifted his head. His eyes opened wide in recognition. “Hello, Don.” The Mountie was an old schoolmate of Garth’s named Don Docker. We had met him before when he’d come to a club in Toronto to see one of our shows. He had a reputation for being a tough little SOB.

  The cops piled us in cars and drove to the Mississauga police station near the airport. They booked us and threw us in jail. We were confused, terrified, and speechless, not sure who to call, what to do next. A few hours ago we’d been smoking a celebratory spliff, and now our freedom was in jeopardy. None of us could make sense of what had happened. How did the police know we were going to the airport, and that we had some pot? My mind was racing. This could mean anything—that we were done, that our music career had just come to a dead end. And we might be going to prison.

  A little while later the booking officer brought us out of our cells. “You can make a couple calls. You’re going to have to see if you can make ba
il, and you’re going to need a lawyer. These are serious charges against you that can carry a ten-year sentence for importing drugs into the country for the purpose of sale, and—”

  “Officer, we’re not drug dealers, you know that,” I interrupted.

  “No, I don’t know that!” he said, slamming his hand on the desk. “Make your calls. I need you back in that cell.”

  We called Colonel Kudlets, who gave a Jewish cry of dismay. “Oy, don’t tell me. How could this happen?” He suggested trying Jack Fisher, the owner of the Concord and the Friar’s. So we did, and a couple of hours later he and the Colonel came to the jail and bailed us out—we were very grateful. Jack said he knew a retired judge in the Mississauga precinct who still practiced law and sometimes took on a case. “I’ll try to convince him to represent you,” he said.

  The next day our bust was all over the newspapers. We were staying at my mother’s and had to explain to her that this was all a misunderstanding and that there was nothing to get upset about. She went along, but we could tell she didn’t really buy our story. Rick put his arm around her and said, “Have I ever let you down, Mama Kosh? Well, I’m not about to start now,” which brought a smile to her face.

  Two days later we began our stint at the Friar’s under duress. The place was packed with patrons who wanted to see the druggies live and in person. People called out requests for songs like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” To make matters worse, Ronnie and his new band were playing up the street at Le Coq d’Or, and we heard he was making jokes about our pot bust from the stage, no doubt enjoying our predicament.